Cultural Preservation is an Ongoing Effort

“Historical oblivion is the default, not the exception” to the human record, writes game designer Jordan Mechner in his contribution to this report.13 Be it natural elements like fire or water, negligent or intentional people, or simple forgetfulness, practically all human expression will disappear or change without human intervention. Only through acts of repair and digitization will materials such as a grandmother’s cookbook, a groundbreaking game ahead of its time, or endangered lang...

 Corporations Controlling Culture

Corporate interests, alongside changes in media distribution, are eroding the public’s ability to construct and access its own cultural record. As more digital content is being provided to individuals, libraries, and archives solely through streaming and temporary licensing deals, rather than through permanent ownership, cultural objects such as sound recordings, books, television shows, and films are at constant risk of being removed from platforms without ever being archived. This means t...

 Star Trek as an Addictive Drug

Why Some Cyberpunks Love Star Trek Even Though It Sucks, When Cyberpuks Always Diss What is Lame and Useless The secret is that Star Trek, in all its generations and spinoffs, was designed to be habit-forming. Star Trek is the first virtual designer drug. Like the cousins of opium, a Star Trek episode induces a pleasurable buzz for a programmed length of time. Like the opiates, it does so by raising your gullibility levels and jamming your critical factulties, thus lowering your pleasure thr...

 Communities That Can't Grow Through Biological Reproduction

There's a membership problem. Haqr society is like the Shakers--the community can't grow by the usual primate strategy--biological reproduction is right out--so its continuation depends on the faithful going out and bringing in new recruits from the general population. Yes, we're saying it out loud: Haqrs recruit. Haqrs are intrinsically subversive to the young. Haqrs are conscious role models for haqr glory. If that weren't enough, haqrs actively seek to conver the imaginative and the credul...

 How the Powerful Influence Culture

Signification, which is the only function of a word admitted by semantics, reaches perfection in the sign. Whether folk-songs were rightly or wrongly called upper-class culture in decay, their elements have only acquired their popular form through a long process of repeated transmission. The spread of popular songs, on the other hand, takes place at lightning speed. The American expression “fad,” used for fashions which appear like epidemics – that is, inflamed by highly-concentrated ec...

 Cobain Could Not Escape the Monetization of Art

What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled 'alternative' or 'independent' cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. 'Alternative' and 'independent' don't designate s...

 Modern Absence of Monoculture

It is difficult to, either quantitatively (through sales, net worth, or awards) or qualitatively (through an objective hierarchisation of cultural products) provide an indisputable metric for ‘fame.’ First, there are contextually contingent variables like streaming or internet relevance preventing me from drawing transhistorical comparisons with say, The Beatles or Michael Jackson. And then there is the reality that in our postmodern, globalised world, culture has expanded, mutat...

 Luddite Club

“Lots of us have read this book called ‘Into the Wild,’” said Lola Shub, a senior at Essex Street Academy, referring to Jon Krakauer’s 1996 nonfiction book about the nomad Chris McCandless, who died while trying to live off the land in the Alaskan wilderness. “We’ve all got this theory that we’re not just meant to be confined to buildings and work. And that guy was experiencing life. Real life. Social media and phones are not real life.” “When I got my flip phone, things ...

 Danica Roem on Metallica

While listening to Mandatory Metallica on @SXMLiquidMetal tonight in celebration of the 30th anniversary of The Black Album, I was thinking about what it meant to me as a teenager in the late '90s, a few years after it debuted in '91. So here's a meandering, rambling story. Middle school is when my taste in music started expanding beyond classic rock, which is what I was raised on from basically birth. My sister was big into grunge, so I picked up some of that from her (Nirvana, Alice in C...

 Adults Fear Leisure Because They Lose Control of the Cult...

In part, adults feared youth leisure because it symbolized rapid change and the inability of parents to control the culture of their o1spring, which seemed to be dominated by commercial entertainment. Commercialized youth leisure grew impressively during and after World War II. Parents away as soldiers or o1 at work lost control over their o1spring, and increased afluence encouraged commercialized play. In the 1950s, new technologies like the 45 rpm record and the transistor radio were quickl...